Paul Dewar's war on colour, creed and physical ability

Paul Dewar is hoping to boost his campaign to win the NDP leadership with a classic little piece of leftwing social engineering.

Mr. Dewar says that, if elected to head a Dewar government, he’d bring back the $2 per vote subsidy for federal parties, but only for parties that nominate an acceptable number of women candidates. You’d get the full $2 if 50% or more of candidates are women, $1.75 for 40-49%, $1.50 if you beat 30%, and zippo if you nominate less than 30%. The 30% cutoff was chosen because apparently the UN says you need that many woman for a “critical mass.”

Is this the dumbest NDP idea ever, or just the most recent? Let’s start with the discriminatory aspects. Just what does Mr. Dewar have against blacks, browns, gays, Jews, Muslims, the handicapped, low-income groups or First Nations? Why are women receiving special treatment over these other groups, which, arguably, are more deserving? Canadian women represent 50% of the population, are skilled, well educated and capable of organizing themselves superbly, as they’ve shown many times. Women students dominate many university faculties and are increasingly powerful in the top professions. If they wanted more MPs badly enough, they certainly have the tools to bring it about, unlike many other groups that lack many of the strengths they can call on. So why set quotas on women, and not on religious, ethnic or social groups that face a far greater struggle to break into Parliament?

Once we set quotas for Parliament, why would we stop there? It would be logical to also set quotas for the civil service, as a preliminary move to introducing them to the private sector. If the House of Commons can be incentivized to increase female representation, it makes equal sense to offer tax breaks to big banks, Big Oil and Big Everything Else to put more women on their boards and into their executive offices. It doesn’t matter if they’re the best qualified, since Mr. Dewar has made no suggestion that women MPs should be the best qualified. All that’s important to Mr. Dewar’s proposal is their sex.

Of course, quotas like Mr. Dewar’s invite tokenism, and it’s possible some women won’t appreciate the condescending nature of his proposal, which suggest parties have to be bribed into accepting them. His plan also overlooks the possibility that women are a minority in Parliament because many women simply are not interested in wasting their time or careers on the childish antics for which the Commons is so well known. Ottawa is regularly denounced as a place in which a small coterie of powerful people hold all the strings, while ordinary MPs while away their time obeying orders and mouthing the official line. Maybe men are willing to put up with this, and get a kick out of the kindergarten atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean women have to share their enthusiasm.

You don’t have to look very deep beneath the NDP’s surface to find a party still addicted to remaking the world to fit its utopian view of perfect equality. If parties are to receive $2 for nominating women, why not a bonus for favouring women with other social or cultural identities? Say $2.50 for a lesbian, $3 if she’s in a wheelchair, $5 is she’s also an aboriginal. Absurd and offensive? You bet it is. But that’s what you get when you start advocating decisions based on a person’s race, gender or creed, rather than their qualifications, ability and desire